The Green Integer Blog supplements our Green Integer website with essays on various cultural topics by editor/publisher Douglas Messerli, along with a listing of Green Integer titles and information on our new books. Please note that all essays and commentary are copyrighted by the author, Douglas Messerli, and may not be republished without permission.

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Thursday, July 24, 2014

"In the Shadow" (on the Odessa Film Festival)

in the shadow

It
may be hard to imagine ordinary life at the moment in the war-torn Ukraine.
Certainly, it is a time of serious considerations among both its leaders and
residents. In Ukraine’s decision to move forward to possible closer
relationships with Europe, the country is also suffering financially and in
need of Russian oil and gas resources, as some of their military and everyday
citizens are being killed by separatist-Russian supported forces.

Despite these problems—or as the sponsors may argue “because” of them—a
group of Odessa film enthusiasts, led by Julia Sinkevyich, determined to move
ahead with a film festival in Odessa.

As the Los
Angeles Times article by Steven Zeitchik reminded us, this Black Sea-side city
of over one million citizens, was home to the 1905 worker’s revolution
surrounding the Battleship Potemkin, where hundreds of its inhabitants were
killed in side streets near the famed “Potemkin Steps.” Following the 1917
Bolshevik revolution, moreover, the city was occupied variously by the
Ukrainian Tsentral’na Rada army, the
French Army, the Red Army, and the White Army. The following year it became the
capital of the Odessa Soviet Republic, and in 1920 was taken over by the Red
Army, uniting it with the Ukrainian SSR to be swallowed up into the Soviet
Union. Odessans suffered again from the famine of 1921-1922 caused by the
Russian Civil War.

During World War II, the city was occupied by Romanian troops before
being partially destroyed by retreating Red Army units. Just as Kiev, the city
was land-mined. During the Axis occupation the city was put under siege
(remembered as the Siege of Odessa), during which 25,000 citizens were murdered
and 35,000 deported; eighty percent of the city’s and the region’s 210,000 Jews
were killed. Fortunately, the Romanians refused to deport the remaining Jewish
population to the extermination camps, allowing the survival of many Jews that
would have been put to death in other regions of occupied eastern Europe.

The Ukrainian city, in short, suffered
throughout the 20th century, and the new signs of warfare are not
lost on its citizens. Unlike other film festivals across the world,
accordingly, the success of this festival was defined by the very fact that it
occurred, surviving the criticisms of those Odessa citizens who opposed what
they perceived as a frivolous art affair. Few major stars and directors showed
up to the festival, but, as the Times article
reported, director Stephen Frears, who came, in part, because of the city’s “immigrant-rich
history.” Other directors such as Darren Aronofsky corresponded with the
festival audiences through Skype, and acclaimed movies such and Richard
Linklater’s Boyhood and the 2014 Palme
d’Or winner, Winter Sleep, were
premiered. The festival favorite was the Ukrainian film, Blind Dates.

Sinkevyich herself admitted that the
founders themselves almost got cold feet and were ready to cancel the event,
particularly after the May 2nd clashes between Ukrainian supporters
and Russian separatists in the city’s streets. Sinkevyich, feeling that Odessa
citizens deserved some artistic distractions, launched a fund-raising campaign from
it potential audience and called the director of the Sarajevo Film Festival,
who had also dared to organize such an event during wartime activities, for
advice. Balancing showings with moments of silence—particularly when news
reached the celebrants that the Malaysian Airlines plane had been downed over
the eastern city of Donetsk—the festival proved a blessed counter to the daily
troubles faced by Ukrainians in general. 15,000 people showed up, so reports
the Times, to a showing of a silent
version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail,
accompanied by live orchestra, on the city’s Potemkin steps. The festival also
showed several films dealing with revolutionary events within a non-competitive
banner titled “Way to Freedom.” Among those films was Jehane Noujaim’s The Square on events in Egypt and Vlad
Petri’s Where Are You Bucharest? on Romania.